Roland Barthes is best known as a semiologist, studying the science of signs and seeing human beings primarily as communicating animals. Introducing Barthes elucidates his application of these ideas to literature, language, gesture, visual images, popular culture, clothing, and fashion, and explains why his thinking in this area made him a key figure in the structuralist movement of the 1960s. Like the other titles in the Introducing series, this book illuminates the essential arguments and concepts of its subject in a graphic context of informational and impressionistic cartoons, drawings, and diagrams, along with quotes, voice balloons, sidebars, and other visual commentary.